I shudder to think of how much money they must spend to insure the appropriate website appears when someone Googles their name.
But this is beside the point.
The point is that I'm tackling Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises again, which is easily one of my favorite novels. It's been a couple of years since I last read it, and the dialogue is just as appealing as I remembered it:
"Mike was pretty excited about his girl friend," I said in the taxi.
"Well," said Bill. "You can't blame him such a hell of a lot."
"Well," said Bill. "You can't blame him such a hell of a lot."
The girl friend in question is Lady Brett Ashley, of course, and this time around I'm noticing that she seems less sympathetic than in previous readings, like perhaps she would ruin Jake, too, if she had the chance. It's strange for me to see it this way because Hemingway has always been one of my favorite authors. In fact, I've consistently been able to overlook (and sometimes romanticize) his shortcomings. As evidence, I submit to the jury portions of an email written about two and a half years ago:
23 September 2008, 11:46pm
Dear _____,The chances of this being cogent are marginal because it is still working itself through my noggin. Whenever I get these literary insights (at least w/regards to prose-length form and structure) I have an immediate, visceral reaction to the realization of the knowledge, but my mind has to catch up, rearranging itself in its own sweet time while I go about my business. That being said, here goes...
tumbled
I finished Marquez a couple of days ago, and I celebrated by going to Goodwill to buy a bookshelf. I left the store with no bookshelf whatsoever, but a bevy of beautiful books, included A Moveable Feast by Hemingway. I had never read it and figured I should probably regain my literary balance because Marquez's rich, descriptive prose had such an effect me. It seemed to me that Papa's direct, declaratory, adjective-free sentences were just what the doctor ordered. (There is no doctor). The book isn't really a memoir, more like anecdotal ruminations on his time in Paris when he worked as a newspaper writer before his first novel (The AMAZING Sun Also Rises) was published.
stumbled
I finished the book this morning, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up because the last few pages recount the dissolution of his first marriage on the eve of his publication, fame, and fortune. Hemingway describes the events leading up to it:
"When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to when as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon... Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away..."
"Under the charm of these rich I was as trusting and stupid as a bird dog who wants to go out with any man with a gun, or a trained pig in a circus who has finally found someone who loves and appreciates him for himself alone. That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a marvelous discovery. I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a write can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices..."
"Before these rich had come we had been infiltrated by another rich using the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. When the husband is a writer and doing difficult work so that he is occupied much of the time and is not a good companion or partner to his wife for a big part of the day, the arrangement has advantages until you know how it works out. The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished the work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both..."
"All truly wicked things start from innocence... I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her... Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris.... and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when were very poor and very happy."
What struck me so soundly was his atypical sentence structure and the use of simile ("as migrating birds," "stupid as a bird dog," "a trained pig"). Something seemed off; then it began to dawn on me: He finished this book in 1960 and killed himself the next year.
There are anecdotes of Scott Fitzgerald's genius and its destruction, Zelda and her "hawk-eyed" madness, and the gap that grew between he and Gertrude Stein after he heard her pleading upstairs for Alice Tolkas not to leave.
The final chapter, in his only autobiographical work, was full of this remorse and sadness for the things he saw and did as a young man. It shook me to think of this good man (and great writer) so sad in his final days about the life he had lived.
(s)tumbled
The Madness began to grip me as I watched it all start to unfold. This was my initial written response in my journal, just before I emailed you:
i just read the suicide note of a good man and a great writer on the morning i came to know - if not understand - that i am a good writer, perhaps a great writer, but that what i desire most is to be a great man. i do not want to look back, aged 61 years, at the life and love i lost in Paris nostalgias. i do not want the writing to be corrupted by emotion - as was his final chapter, when his simple declarations gave way to commas and simile on the eve of his suicide.
1) I do not wish to write as him, my first love, who corrupted me with visions of Paris and Lady Brett Ashley.
2) I do not wish to write as him, my last love, whose travels and ramblings - for a time - meant much more to me than my own.
3) I love you both, and may your souls breathe easy tonight.
[...]
4) A caterpillar spins it own coffin, answering the question: am i not a butterfly?
As ever, the whole world is really all in love,
15 January 2011, 3:13 pm
I'm starting to question some of the things I wrote in this letter. I now wonder, for example, if Hemingway really felt remorse for the mistakes of his youth, or was merely using A Moveable Feast as his mea culpa to history, to the children and wives and loved ones he abandoned.
In short, it looks as though I'm reassessing my understanding of the man, which is precisely what one is supposed to do when s/he looks into a subject more deeply. What I'm seeing is profoundly disturbing. Earlier in the week my new favorite professor cautioned that this very thing might happen, but I brushed off his warning as mere pomp and affect.
It looks like I was wrong.
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